Putting aside general and local elections, party conferences are arguably still considered the most important events in the political calendar. Like-minded individuals – who often don’t have the luxury of living on a politically cosmopolitan university campus – get the chance to mingle. The strategy of the party is set and its core messages are communicated. Conferences also take politics out of Westminster and across the country. On the surface at least, they seem to play a valuable role in British politics.

But over the past twenty years, party conferences have undergone a radical transformation. The aforementioned decline in party membership has undoubtedly had a role to play. Leaders have seen less to gain from appeasing the party faithful, simply because there are less of them. They have been encouraged to seek out the centre-ground and chase the increasing numbers of “floating voters”. And since Blair, they have felt the need (perhaps justifiably) to develop acute awareness of their media image in order to accomplish this.

To appease a media for which style supersedes substance, leaders have allowed their conferences to become the playthings of party spin doctors. They have become yet another platform from which meaningless sound bites can be delivered. In the leaders’ speeches themselves, vague demographic catch-alls, like David Cameron’s ‘aspiration nation’, are the name of the game. They are perfectly choreographed; everything from the lighting to the music is obsessed over, all with the aim of producing (and carefully polishing) an appealing image for outsiders.

Perhaps, then, it really is time for change. Parties need their members and they can do so much more with them at conferences than give them time to clap. At these gatherings, they have an opportunity to offer delegates a sense of ownership and belonging: a stake in their party. They have few other opportunities to do so on this scale and plenty of time to announce policy and talk in platitudes to the public.

If there is going to be a change, leaders need to stop believing the hype. A conference speech that will be seen on BBC News will not win an election, no matter how well delivered it is. However, canvassing will. Maintaining an enthusiastic base is key. Party conferences should do more than provide the platforms for stage-managed speeches and those behind them need to stop taking their delegates for granted. Conferences have not necessarily had their day. They can be saved, but they will need to be transformed.

Originally written for publication in The Boar, Warwick University’s student newspaper.

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Less than a year ago, David Cameron told us that lobbying was “the next big scandal waiting to happen”. In hindsight, he was spot on, but at the time, few of us realized he was in fact preparing us for what Nick Robinson so delicately deigned the ‘re-toxification’ of the Tories.

Most of us didn’t expect much from Dave, then. Indeed, if he’d only marginally cut the number of private meetings with multimillionaire donors, we’d have probably been satisfied. But, fast-forward a few months and now he’s in a lot of hot water. A serious amount of hot water, various journalists clamor to inform us. So much hot water, that we’d be forgiven for coming to the conclusion that David Cameron now primarily resides in some sort of metaphorical political kettle. But why we’ve only so excitedly forced him in there after the most recent revelations, is a mystery to me.

The fact that large donations get you access to the PM really shouldn’t shock us. We’ve repeatedly been fed the line that a large donation gets you into what Cruddas called ‘the premier league’. But the Tories have their own public name for it. On their website, the Conservative Party offers you access to what they call ‘The Leaders Group’ for the paltry sum of £50 000 a year. You will be “invited to join David Cameron and other senior figures … at dinners [and] post-PMQ lunches”. It’s not £250k, so it may not get you into the ‘premier league’, but as it requires over 8000 hours of work on the minimum wage to raise the required funds it’s by no means a steal for all the ‘real people’ Dave has always been so eager to connect with.

But we’ve also been shocked by the influence over policy these donations allegedly buy. Really? Why? What did we believe donors were talking about over those fifty-grand Post-PMQ lunches? The weather? EastEnders? The England team? If you ask me, being part of the ‘leaders group’ does in fact make you sound and seem more influential than being part of a lowly ‘policy unit’.

Ed Miliband has seized this scandal as the political opportunity it was, of course, destined to be. But his hands are hardly clean. Putting aside the incredible influence that the unions predictably and consistently purchase in his party, on the Labour party’s website he invites you to join ‘The Thousand Club’. As a member, you will gain access to to ‘Exclusive Thousand Club Q & A events’ as well as ‘summer and winter receptions’ – although, it should be noted, Ed doesn’t promise he’ll be at any of these. Coming in at a considerably lower price of £1200 per year, you might get up close and personal to a top opposition politician for a lot less than a Tory. That said, as a struggling supermarket retail assistant desperate to engage in Labour party politics at this level, you’d still have to put in 190 hours of backbreaking minimum wage work to raise the cash to join.

As a result of the scandal, lists of donors David Cameron has dined with in his flat are being published as I write – and that is by no means a bad thing. But our sudden moral indignation seems odd to me. What’s more, it’s all come a little late. Could we not have got angry before the NHS bill went through parliament, and demanded to see how many private health company executives David Cameron has met with over the past few months? Only by seeing footage of Cruddas asking for large sums of money and telling us what we (deep down) already knew about policy makers and shakers, have we become engaged.

Putting all of this to one side, I should like to end this column positively. Looking to the future, like many others, I am waiting with bated breath for David Cameron’s announcement of the next “big scandal” that will seriously damage his party. Who knows – in a few months, we might be treated to secretly filmed footage of one of a top Tory advocating fox hunting and that, dear readers, would be huge.

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